Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(18)

He stepped inside and looked around with acute interest. The cottage was bigger than he had first thought. It looked clean and airy with polished oak floors. The main room and short hallway were painted a mellow sage green, with cream trim. Two armchairs were pulled in front of a fireplace, and there was also a wooden table and benches, clean bare countertops, a wood stove, a sink and cabinets.

Carling strode down a short hallway, and he followed her past a small modern-looking blue-tiled bathroom and two other rooms, one painted a warm orange and the other a rich gold. Both rooms held tall wooden bookshelves that were filled with books. Rune caught a glimpse of one shelf that was comprised of cubbyholes that looked to be filled with scrolls of papyrus. He was quite sure he was looking at one of the rarest collections of magic lore in the world, amassed, no doubt, over many centuries of patient research and effort.

Carling stepped into a third room where a mahogany desk and leather chair were placed strategically near French-style doors. The room’s neutral tones brought the eye immediately to the small private walled courtyard, where a brilliant profusion of flowering plants burgeoned just on the other side of the doors. The rest of the room was filled with file cabinets and what appeared to be a large old wooden wardrobe carved with symbols that seemed to shimmer. The front doors had a metal lock that was tarnished with age.

When he looked at the carved wardrobe, something crept along the edges of his mind. It was a dark oily perversion of a feeling. His lip lifted in an instinctive snarl.

Carling slammed her fist into the wood as she walked past and said, “Shut up.”

The whispering stopped abruptly.

Well, now that was just too much to pass up without comment. He didn’t even try. He said, “What’s in the wardrobe?”

She glanced at him. “Books that don’t behave.”

Misbehaving books? Not bothering to hide his skepticism, he said, “Uh-huh.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look and went back to the wardrobe to unlock it with another Power-filled word. Then she opened the doors wide, stepped to one side and gestured with a snappy flip of her fingers. “See for yourself.”

The interior was filled with shelves, and what certainly did appear to be books. Rune stepped closer, angling his head in order to read the spines. There weren’t any titles printed on the spines. These books were hand-stitched and very old.

That one—was that . . . ? The whispering started again, very low, at the edge of his consciousness. He reached out and Carling grabbed him by the wrist. After the first hard squeeze, she pushed him away gently.

“These should only be handled with gloves,” she said.

“Their magic is too dark and invasive.”

“You make them sound infectious,” he said. He glanced at her. “That one is not made of leather.”

“Well,” she said, “it is a certain kind of leather.”

His eyebrows plummeted in a fierce frown and his nostrils pinched in distaste. “Your magic doesn’t feel black like this.”

“That’s because it isn’t.” She shut and locked the doors again. “I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the centuries, but I’m glad to say turning to Powers that black hasn’t been one of them. They demand too high a level of sacrifice. They eat everything you give them and then they take your soul as well.”

“Then why do you keep these?”

The look Carling gave him at that had turned quizzical. She walked to her desk. “Do you not study the tools your enemies use?”

He folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “Yes, but generally those tools are not . . . infectious.”

“Where would treatment methods for the Ebola virus be if it were not studied? This is no different and, believe me, I take precautions. Thankfully the need to consult those resources is rare, which is why they sometimes get restless. Things that are made with black magic are hungry and they are never satisfied.”

“You talk about them as though they’re sentient.” He glared at the cabinet, the hackles raised at the back of his neck.

“I think they are, at least semi-sentient. Something lingers of their creators, along with something of the souls of the victims that were sacrificed in their creation.” She sat at the desk and opened the lowest drawer, which was unlocked. He could see it contained files labeled in a neat hand. She pulled out a few notebooks and closed the drawer. “This is the distillation of the last few centuries of work I’ve done on trying to find a way to halt the progression of Vampyrism.”

He regarded her with a keen gaze. “And halting the progression of the disease is more preferable than finding a cure, because a cure would make you human again?”

“Theoretically. Unfortunately too much of this is still theoretical, because there really is no known cure. And there are serious issues and questions should a ‘cure’ ever be found.” She handed the notebooks to him.

He opened the top notebook to look at the first page. It was written in the same neat hand that had created the file labels. “I would want to know how a cure would be tested,” he remarked. “And where, and on whom.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps a big medical facility with a focus on research might take it on, like Johns Hopkins University. There might be enough Vampyres who are unhappy enough that they would be willing to take some risks, but there has been no code of ethics developed for clinical trials because there’s nothing that has been successfully developed enough to test.”